tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87904184530289212182018-02-17T04:32:34.631-08:00Pieces Of Lightscience and storyCharles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.comBlogger157125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-9313321829628869772014-06-28T08:06:00.001-07:002014-06-28T08:06:49.489-07:00Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, by Paul Bloom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mXbNpfusS9A/U67ZRingT5I/AAAAAAAAAbY/MUO8_Tpjb2U/s1600/just-babies-high-res-jacket-image1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mXbNpfusS9A/U67ZRingT5I/AAAAAAAAAbY/MUO8_Tpjb2U/s1600/just-babies-high-res-jacket-image1.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></a></div>I reviewed <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bloom_%28psychologist%29" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Paul Bloom (psychologist)">Paul Bloom</a>'s latest book for the December 2013&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/" target="_blank">Literary Review</a></i>; it is reproduced here with permission.<br /><br />Why are we good? More interestingly, perhaps, why aren’t we better? As a species we are able to demonstrate astonishing capacities for kindness to others, but only to some of them (to other others we can be perfectly horrid). Explaining why our morality is so selective has been a perennial problem for moral philosophy and these days attracts as much interest from those who probe the mind and brain with scientific methods.<br /><br />Many of the recent morality headlines have centred around so-called ‘trolley’ problems. Would you flip a switch to change the path of a runaway railway trolley from a track where there are five incapacitated people to a track where there is just one? Probably. Would you push an overweight fellow from a bridge into the path of the trolley if it had the same net effect? Probably not. The growth of ‘trolleyology’ and other experimental methods has allowed psychologists to describe the often trivial factors that weigh on our moral judgements and cognitive neuroscientists to get busy tracing their neural underpinnings.<br /><br />In his new book, Paul Bloom, a developmental psychologist at Yale, argues that we should not seek the origins of moral behaviour exclusively in either nature (our innate instincts to behave well or badly towards others) or nurture (the assimilation of moral norms through enculturation). Instead, he claims, our capacities for behaving in good ways or bad stem from interactions between what we are born with and what we acquire through experience. Citing the philosopher Adam Smith, Bloom argues that the foundations of our morality – what Thomas Jefferson called a ‘moral sense’ – are an innate endowment crafted by natural selection. These inbuilt capacities are then shaped by experience to form the sense of right and wrong that we rely on as adults. Against this background, getting developmental about morality seems eminently sensible. If you want to know what degree of good and evil we are born with, why not watch how babies behave?<br /><br />Modern developmental psychology reveals that Jefferson’s ‘moral sense’ turns out to be not so much an impulse to do good or evil as a capacity to make moral judgements. Six-month-old babies are more likely to reach towards a puppet seen to help a ball move up a hill than towards one that had hindered the ball’s passage. It’s not enough merely to be able to tell good from bad behaviour; true morality is accompanied by certain feelings as well. Toddlers will soothe someone in pain or distress, demonstrating that empathy can motivate compassion even very early in life. Little kids are also big on fairness, as any parent will confirm. All is not rosy in the nursery, however: game theory studies show that children only really care about equality if they are the ones to miss out on their fair share. Children’s appetites for punishment and revenge also reflect what Bloom calls the ‘darker side of morality’. A desire for punishment, he argues, is ‘an accidental spillover of a more narrow proclivity toward revenge’ – we retaliate against those who have harmed us and then, through the exercise of empathy, extend that thirst for retribution to those who do harm to others.<br /><br />There are of course other limits to children’s innate goodness. Bloom spends some time wondering whether racial bias and other forms of bigotry might be parasitic on the biologically adaptive tendency to form exclusive coalitions. When it comes to moralising about sex, the more primitive emotion of disgust comes into play. There is no satisfactory evolutionary story to explain a phenomenon like homophobia (if anything, straight men should thank gay guys for leaving more women to go around). For Bloom, the only explanation that works is that sex is about bodies and bodies trigger evolved reactions of disgust that are subsequently shaped by laws, religion and culture. Moral outrage grows out of more primitive (and scientifically explicable) instincts. Whisper it among consenting adults, but sexual morality isn’t about morality at all.<br /><br />When your starting points are evolutionary biology and developmental psychology rather than moral philosophy, questions of right and wrong begin to look rather different. Our differing responses to the two <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Trolley problem">trolley problems</a> mentioned before make little sense from the perspective of consequentialism (the idea that we make moral judgements on the basis of their outcomes). The traditional alternative, deontology, proposes that we follow certain broader moral principles even if they lead to worse outcomes. But the idea of a universal moral code can’t account for a phenomenon such as slavery: tolerated and practised for so long and now almost universally reviled. In Bloom’s view, the recognition of the wrongness of slavery was a moral discovery, not the exercise of innate insight (the industry could not have lasted so long otherwise). We create the environments in which the natural moral sense of a baby is transformed into an adult’s sophisticated moral code.<br /><br /><i>Just Babies</i> reads rather differently from those pop-psychology blockbusters that uncritically seek counterintuitive findings, bombard the reader with neuroimaging or claim that we are all the blind slaves of our passions. Bloom is perhaps not as vocal about the limits of his developmental method as he might have been: the evidence from babies is necessarily patchy, and there could have been more on arguments about what exactly should count as ‘innate’ and why some individuals’ moral capacities fail so spectacularly. ‘Strong is the Power of the Dark Side’, as Bloom imagines Yoda saying, and his witty, elegant account understandably leaves a few questions unanswered. It may not be fashionable, but Bloom’s sober stance at the frontier of the science of morality is much to be admired.<br /> Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-23381155284385826852013-10-27T07:45:00.001-07:002013-10-27T07:45:15.945-07:00Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GBzsl4Ywb38/Um0VspjOnaI/AAAAAAAAAZU/BWOIxkkUQZ8/s1600/BXf3tK8CcAE8KbD.jpg-large.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GBzsl4Ywb38/Um0VspjOnaI/AAAAAAAAAZU/BWOIxkkUQZ8/s400/BXf3tK8CcAE8KbD.jpg-large.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>To the Sage Gateshead yesterday for BBC Radio 3's <a href="http://www.sagegateshead.com/tour-dates/bbc-radio-3-free-thinking-festival-2013" target="_blank">Free Thinking Festival</a>, and an event with acclaimed novelist <a href="http://www.patrickness.com/" target="_blank">Patrick Ness</a> on the topic of '<a href="http://www.sagegateshead.com/event/whos-got-hold-of-childrens/" target="_blank">Who's got hold of children's imaginations</a>?' The discussion was chaired by Radio 3 <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp43" target="_blank">Night Waves</a> presenter <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp43/profiles/matthewsweet" target="_blank">Matthew Sweet</a>&nbsp;(to the left of the picture).<br /><br />Matthew started the show by asking us about the nature of imagination. I noted that the ability to inhabit alternative realities used to strike psychologists as an odd thing from an evolutionary point of view: why should an organism whose existence depended on representing reality accurately be so good at inventing alternative worlds?<br /><br />An answer (again from a scientific point of view) is that there is a big selective advantage in being able to represent how the world might be, as well as how it is. If you can create a storyworld, you can make sense of people telling you about things that are not immediately present, and you can use information about what has happened in order to plan what will come next. Here's how I put it in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Baby-Mirror-Childs-World/dp/184708074X/" target="_blank">The Baby in the Mirror</a></i> (with reference to the world of Harvard psychologist <a href="http://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/faculty-detail/?fc=445" target="_blank">Paul Harris</a>):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The storyworlds that children create in making sense of the discourse of others are the same as they use in talking about the past and future, and in creating the imaginary worlds of pretence, role play and narrative. The little scientist is usurped by the little novelist. Or perhaps, in the end, fiction-making has more than a little of science about it. To get on in the world, the child, like the novelist and the engineer, has to build her models and see how they run.&nbsp;</blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/bm.html" target="_blank">The Baby in the Mirror</a></i>, pp. 179-180</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div>Patrick then read from his new novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Than-This-Patrick-Ness/dp/1406331155/" target="_blank">More Than This</a></i>, which begins with the protagonist Seth's attempts to reconstruct his past life in the moments following his own death by drowning. One interesting thing about this powerful sequence is that Seth is doing his remembering entirely on his own, without the cues that are usually provided by other people. I noted that in many other cases <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/14/shared-memories-problems-they-cause" target="_blank">memory is a social process</a>. We talked about how we are constantly negotiating our accounts of the past in collaboration with other people, and how&nbsp;<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-child-in-time/201012/talking-about-the-past" target="_blank">talking about the past with parents might be one of the ways in which children get a foothold into doing autobiographical memory</a>.<br /><br />The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/13/our-memories-tell-our-story" target="_blank">creative, reconstructive nature of memory</a> came up many times in the conversation, as did the clear links between imagination and memory. We talked about the role of children's <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/soren-lorensen-was-here.html" target="_blank">imaginary companions</a> in helping them to work out how the world <i>might</i> be as well as how it is.&nbsp;We also talked about why children's imaginations can seem so dangerous to us adults, and about whether we should impose any limits on children's freedom to imagine. I mentioned the growing body of scientific research that lends support to what we probably already knew at an intuitive level: that <a href="http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/reading-literary-but-not-pop-fiction.html" target="_blank">reading fiction enhances empathy</a>&nbsp;(see <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715" target="_blank">here</a> for a methodological critique). I think there can be a rather reductionist agenda at work here, the idea that a truth is somehow ‘more true’ if it can be demonstrated neuroscientifically. Books are understood by people; they’re not understood by neurones. As <a href="http://www.neilgaiman.com/" target="_blank">Neil Gaiman</a> recently reminded us in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming" target="_blank">his eloquent lecture for the Reading Agency</a>, imagination, particularly in childhood, should be valued for its own sake.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ypw0k4hcMbE/Um0e3rMUpAI/AAAAAAAAAZo/c6oGcQDvCY8/s1600/ABoxofBirds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ypw0k4hcMbE/Um0e3rMUpAI/AAAAAAAAAZo/c6oGcQDvCY8/s320/ABoxofBirds.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>I was asked to address the question of who controls imagination and memory with a reading from <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i>, my novel addressing the implications of neuroscience for our understanding of ourselves.&nbsp;At the heart of the novel there’s a conflict between the idea that we are autonomous selves, narrating and giving shape to our own stories, and the idea that we are biochemical machines, bundles of chemical reactions and neural firings. I wondered what would happen if you took a character who really believed that her experience could be understood in terms of neuroscientific processes, and saw what happened to that view when things started to happen. I read a short section from towards the end, where Yvonne has been given a device that allows her to manipulate her own memory—leaving her to face some complex moral choices.<br /><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span><span style="text-align: center;">I've done a lot of promotion of my non-fiction book this year, and so it was great to read from the novel and hear people's positive reactions. Matthew did a fabulous job of steering the conversation, and Patrick was on excellent form despite a heavy cold. The whole thing was huge fun and generated some very perceptive audience questions. As you'll see from the audio paraphernalia in the above picture, the event was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3's </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp43" style="text-align: center;" target="_blank">Night Waves</a><span style="text-align: center;"> programme. It will be going out at 10pm on Friday 8 November.</span>Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-5095649173016826912013-09-25T02:07:00.000-07:002013-09-25T02:07:21.673-07:00Shortlisted: Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o5wJXc-5Srk/UkKVk3ITnTI/AAAAAAAAAYc/neMygmzyC2w/s1600/Royal-Society-Winton-shortlist-logo-233x233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o5wJXc-5Srk/UkKVk3ITnTI/AAAAAAAAAYc/neMygmzyC2w/s200/Royal-Society-Winton-shortlist-logo-233x233.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> has made the shortlist for the <a href="http://royalsociety.org/awards/science-books/" target="_blank">Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books</a> 2013.<br /><br />Here is today's&nbsp;<a href="https://royalsociety.org/news/2013/books-prize-shortlist-2013/" target="_blank">press release</a>:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 20.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books shortlist in running for bigger reward</span></b><br /> <br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt;">Winner to be announced: 25 November 2013</span></b><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The six books on the shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books are competing for a much larger cash prize this year. &nbsp;The eclectic and fascinating shortlist books are vying for </span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">the world’s most prestigious award for popular science writing.</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;">The prize money for the winner has increased from £10,000 to <i>£25,000 </i>while the authors of each of the shortlisted books will receive <i>£2,500 </i>instead of the previous £1,000 award.&nbsp; </span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The shortlist, announced today (25 September 2013), is composed of:</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead, published by Bloomsbury<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">What it’s like to be a bird<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “Bird Sense opens new worlds to the imagination through a wealth of passionately observed science. It succeeds in conveying a feeling of what it is like to be a bird.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll, published by OneWorld Publications<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The hunt for the Higgs and the discovery of a new world<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “This book invites you to imagine the unimaginable. It tells an extraordinary tale of scientific discovery and stands out by its ability to speak to people who are not scientists.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">Cells to Civilizations by Enrico Coen, published by Princeton University Press<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The principles of change that shape life <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “Cells to Civilizations presents an exciting challenge to our thinking on how evolution works. It is unbelievably alive and we could feel our brains growing as we read.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough, published by Profile Books<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The new science of memory<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “Our memories of reading this book are exceptionally good ones! It challenges much of what we think we know about memory. It’s a bit like reading a novel, personal and compulsive!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson, published by Granta<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">A 21<sup>st</sup> century bestiary<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “Henderson taps into forgotten wonder we first felt as children discovering the creatures of our world. It borrows its format from ancient bestiaries and its title from Borges’ extraordinary tales. The book itself is a beautiful object and brings barely imagined beings to life.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><b><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts, published by Allen Lane (Penguin Books)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">How our seas are changing<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">The judges said: “Roberts sets modern conservation in context. For instance he has taken fisheries science and channelled it into the mainstream debate. This book is thrilling: a delightful mix of anecdote, research and polemic.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FMedSci FRS</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">, Chair of the judges, said: “What stood out for us most was the sheer originality and the ambition of the books we selected for the short list. Here are books that have not only new things to say but also novel ways to say them in. We were delighted to be able to select from a wide range of superbly written science books, authoritative, approachable, and moreover, thrilling to read.”<span style="color: red;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;">The winner will be announced at a public event at the Royal Society on 25<sup>th</sup> November 2013.</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;">William Hill’s odds for the shortlisted books are as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">3/1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">7/2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">4/1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">5/1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Cells to Civilization by Enrico Coen <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">5/1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;">5/1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">Graham Sharpe, Media Relations Director at William Hill, said: “<span lang="EN-US">This year has been one of the toughest to select a favourite – the books are all so evenly matched! One thing is definite, they all make very interesting and fun reads. I think this year’s judges have quite a task ahead of them deciding their winner!” </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;">The first chapter of each book is available to download for free at: <a href="http://royalsociety.org/awards/science-books/">royalsociety.org/awards/science-books/</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Frutiger 45 Light&quot;;">The judges on this year’s judging panel are Jon Culshaw, impressionist and comedian; Dr Emily Flashman, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at University of Oxford; Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FRS (Chair), Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London; Joanne Harris, novelist and author of Chocolat; and Lucy Siegle, journalist and writer on environmental issues. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: &quot;Frutiger LT Pro 45 Light&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Commencing in 2011, the global investment management company Winton Capital Management agreed a five year sponsorship deal of the prize.&nbsp;</span></div><!--EndFragment--><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d6qyE_uOZy0/UkKWLo24UKI/AAAAAAAAAYk/M6DzBI02U88/s1600/soc+o+bio.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="72" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d6qyE_uOZy0/UkKWLo24UKI/AAAAAAAAAYk/M6DzBI02U88/s200/soc+o+bio.png" width="200" /></a>The book has also made the shortlist for the <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/society-biology-book-awards" target="_blank">Society of Biology Book Awards</a> in the General Biology book section. The prize will be awarded at a ceremony in London on 17 October.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-65305145463227812862013-09-22T00:46:00.001-07:002013-09-22T00:47:17.739-07:00A Writers' Alphabet<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">One fun thing that happened to me at the <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/" target="_blank">Edinburgh International Book Festival</a> was that I was grabbed by the nice people at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books" target="_blank"><i>Guardian</i> Books</a> and asked if I'd contribute to a writers' alphabet they were putting together. All I had to do was come up with a favourite word. Most of the letters were already gone, but they did have a succulent-looking <i>V</i> remaining. I walked around Charlotte Square a couple of times and worked out what I wanted to say. Here's the result.&nbsp;</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowFullScreen='true' webkitallowfullscreen='true' mozallowfullscreen='true' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/eO2PlzVvL4o?feature=player_embedded' FRAMEBORDER='0' /></div>You can see the entire alphabet, from Ruby Wax on a-whoring to Shadow Titan on Zulu, by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/26/authors-favourite-words-video-alphabet" target="_blank">going here</a>.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-50380722497898175102013-08-25T01:40:00.000-07:002013-08-25T02:10:50.506-07:00Three days in EdinburghI just got back from my visit to the <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/" target="_blank">Edinburgh International Book Festival</a>—tired, footsore and with fresh and vivid memories of some lovely new friendships.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KLjMVHIx6u4/UhmwPuA1IcI/AAAAAAAAAW0/R5Ge36cgNaM/s1600/BSS39u5CQAA5q5p.jpg-large.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KLjMVHIx6u4/UhmwPuA1IcI/AAAAAAAAAW0/R5Ge36cgNaM/s320/BSS39u5CQAA5q5p.jpg-large.jpeg" width="320" /></a>On Thursday evening I chaired an event with Neil Gaiman, '<a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/neil-gaiman-with-charles-fernyhough" target="_blank">A Treasure House of Story</a>'. This was the&nbsp;first of several events for Neil at the Festival, and he'd arrived in Edinburgh after a gruelling 9-week tour (and the signing of an estimated 75,000 books). The event was part of a theme, 'Reshaping Modern Fantasy', which Neil had curated for the Festival as Guest Selector.<br /><br />I'd never interviewed a literary megastar before, and I'd worked hard on refamiliarising myself with his work and trying to find a plan for the event that would make sense to Neil and what I knew would be a big crowd. I needn't have worried—Neil proved to be the perfect interviewee. He was funny, warm, articulate and deeply interesting about his new novel,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781472200310&amp;affilId=EBF" target="_blank">The Ocean at the End of the Lane</a></i> and its themes of the powerlessness of childhood, the restless reconstructions of memory, and the pressures that other people put on our representations of the past.&nbsp;Neil said afterwards that he'd enjoyed the opportunity to do something a bit more themed and structured than the usual 'So how much of you is there in this book?'. I loved every moment and was sorry to say goodbye to him as he settled down after the event in front of a long and visibly excited signing queue.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pJR-JX4qxLo/UhmzcC-67mI/AAAAAAAAAW8/fnVxwv22ABo/s1600/Gaiman+movie.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pJR-JX4qxLo/UhmzcC-67mI/AAAAAAAAAW8/fnVxwv22ABo/s320/Gaiman+movie.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>I wasn't quite out of the limelight yet, though, as the guys from <a href="http://www.respectfilms.com/" target="_blank">Respect Films</a>, who are on the road with Neil making a documentary, caught me to talk a bit about the event while Neil signed away in the background.<br /><br />You can read <a href="http://glamourandexcess.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/edinburgh-book-fest-review-neil-gaiman-and-charles-fernyhough/" target="_blank">a review of the event with Neil here</a>.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZK09ALq8xj0/Uhm3lfWLJJI/AAAAAAAAAXI/LXUop_42w9U/s1600/Susannah+Cahalan+by+Chris+Close.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZK09ALq8xj0/Uhm3lfWLJJI/AAAAAAAAAXI/LXUop_42w9U/s320/Susannah+Cahalan+by+Chris+Close.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>On Friday afternoon I was due to chair an event with Susannah Cahalan, a New York journalist whose book<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-On-Fire-Month-Madness/dp/1846147395/" target="_blank">Brain on Fire</a></i> is a funny, moving and pretty terrifying account of a (thankfully temporary) descent into psychosis, amnesia and loss of identity. It was another great event, thanks to Susannah's lively readings and eloquent account of how she put the pieces of her 'lost month' back together. It was particularly interesting to hear her talk about the family context of her story and how she is still negotiating, with her parents and others, their inevitably divergent narratives of what happened. Her story is about the resilience of the human mind and spirit, and it was a privilege to meet her. Here she is pictured in a photograph taken that same afternoon by Festival photographer <a href="http://www.chrisclose.com/" target="_blank">Chris Close</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aHAcvNBz1qI/Uhm4DZgP4rI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/_oMNS6hf-aA/s1600/On+stage+with+Colin+McAdam.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aHAcvNBz1qI/Uhm4DZgP4rI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/_oMNS6hf-aA/s320/On+stage+with+Colin+McAdam.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>My last event was on Saturday morning, and it was a pairing between me and another novelist, the Canadian writer Colin McAdam. Colin has written a deeply interesting book called <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Beautiful-Truth-Colin-McAdam/dp/1847088473" target="_blank">A Beautiful Truth</a>, which tells of relationships between chimpanzees and humans and performs the (you might think) impossible trick of giving voice to chimpanzees' thoughts. I was very struck by Colin's comment that, in search of self-forgiveness, he found that the only way forward was to think of himself as a primate—at which point the world of chimpanzees began to open up for him.<br /><br />I read from and talked about <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Box-Birds-Charles-Fernyhough/dp/1908717572/" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i>&nbsp;and, although the styles and ambitions are different, it was clear that the books have many themes in common—themes that were expertly traced by our chair, <a href="http://www.helensedgwick.com/" target="_blank">Helen Sedgwick</a>. I talked about how I had wanted to explore how a character would make sense of the world, and herself, if she saw herself solely in terms of neurones and chemical reactions. What would happen to that materialist philosophy when things started to happen; when that character had to make moral choices? Without wanting to give the plot away, I pointed out that I had tried to dramatise that question by giving my protagonist, Yvonne, a challenge of freewill—a dilemma in which you would act differently depending on whether you really believed you were only neurones and molecules, or whether you thought that there was something more to your 'self'.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wbo0A2IZDmY/Uhm87Qp5eKI/AAAAAAAAAXg/lUt0H6IiIiM/s1600/CF+by+Chris+Close.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wbo0A2IZDmY/Uhm87Qp5eKI/AAAAAAAAAXg/lUt0H6IiIiM/s320/CF+by+Chris+Close.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>The <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/" target="_blank">Edinburgh International Book Festival</a> is one of the very best festivals around: beautifully organised, gorgeously located and with staff who attend to every detail and make writers and audiences feel very welcome. As I expected, there was much laughter and intellectual surprise to be had in conversations in the Authors' Yurt and beyond. I also got a chance to be photographed by Chris Close for one of the author portraits that are put up around the site. I'm not sure if it's gone up yet. It looks like I'm trying to screw my head back on. Did it come detached in the fun? I like to think that books, and conversations about them, could have that power.<br /><br />Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-21608807017604995552013-08-16T06:14:00.000-07:002013-08-16T06:14:20.728-07:00Inner Speech: an episode of The Forum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ux49d0pZiyQ/Ug34jYLKGoI/AAAAAAAAAWg/2FRP_rAtcd4/s1600/CF+at+BH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ux49d0pZiyQ/Ug34jYLKGoI/AAAAAAAAAWg/2FRP_rAtcd4/s1600/CF+at+BH.jpg" /></a></div>Last week I was at Broadcasting House in London to record an episode of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004kln9" target="_blank">The Forum</a>, the ideas and discussion show that goes out on BBC World Service. The show is chaired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Kendall" target="_blank">Bridget Kendall</a>, and the other studio guests were the broadcaster and social psychologist <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dyvcm" target="_blank">Aleks Krotoski</a> and novelist and short-story writer <a href="http://www.aamerhussein.com/" target="_blank">Aamer Hussein</a>. The programme is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dyvcm/broadcasts/upcoming" target="_blank">broadcast this weekend</a>, first at 23:06 GMT on Saturday, and then again at 10:06 on Sunday and 02:06 on Monday.<br /><br />The theme of the programme is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dyvcm" target="_blank">inner speech</a>: the internal dialogue that makes up much of many people's conscious experience. The conversation began with me setting out some ideas about why we should be interested in inner speech as a phenomenon, and how this kind of mental experience can work both to our benefit and detriment psychologically. As readers of this blog will know, this has been a focus of research for me for a long time: it was the topic of <a href="http://hearingthevoice.org/2013/06/07/life-in-the-chatter-box/" target="_blank">my recent cover feature for <i>New Scientist</i></a>, and it will form the basis of my next non-fiction book for Profile.<br /><br />Aleks then talked about her research (documented in her excellent new book,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Untangling-Web-Aleks-Krotoski/dp/0571303668" target="_blank">Untangling the Web</a></i>) into how the internet is allowing us to experiment with new social identities, and what effect that might have on the inner voice. We talked about how social media such as Twitter can function as a kind of online private speech, a means for self-regulation and emotional expression, which is a topic I have written about previously&nbsp;<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-child-in-time/201102/twittering-out-loud" target="_blank">in relation to Vygotsky's theory</a>.<br /><br />Aamer Hussein's fictions are often preoccupied with the tension between internal and external speech. He writes in both Urdu and English, and has some fascinating things to say about how these different languages afford different kinds of inner and outer speech. His haunting short novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Another-Gulmohar-Tree-Aamer-Hussein/dp/1846590566/" target="_blank">Another Gulmohar Tree</a></i>&nbsp;tells of an Urdu speaker who struggles to translate his innermost thoughts into a form that his English wife can understand.<br /><br />Finally, we had a lot of fun with Aleks' suggestion for a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dyvcm" target="_blank">Sixty Second Idea to Change the World</a>—a regular feature on the show. While recognising that it lay in the realms of science fiction, Aleks suggested inventing a device that would monitor a speaker's inner dialogue and tell you—by the emission of a certain scent or odour—whether they were telling the truth. We were far too polite to mention it on air, but I was reminded of Ernest Hemingway's famous line:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.</blockquote>It would be nice to be able to detect other people's bullshit, but it's handy (especially for a writer) to be able to detect one's own as well.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-78374576139312245822013-08-15T13:27:00.000-07:002013-08-16T06:09:12.668-07:00At the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Exi4RIyQ0nQ/Ug0z397tFSI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/FQh9UAyDtxg/s1600/Unknown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Exi4RIyQ0nQ/Ug0z397tFSI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/FQh9UAyDtxg/s200/Unknown.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Next week I'll be at the <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/" target="_blank">Edinburgh International Book Festival</a> for a series of events on familiar (for me) themes of memory, identity and narrative.<br /><div><br /></div><div>On Thursday 22 August I'll be <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/neil-gaiman-with-charles-fernyhough" target="_blank">in conversation with bestselling author Neil Gaiman</a> about his new novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Ocean-at-End-Lane/dp/1472200314/" target="_blank">The Ocean at the End of the Lane</a></i>&nbsp;and its themes of childhood memory, the line between fantasy and reality, and a child's discovery of the secrets of the adult world. The event, which is a sell-out, forms part of the series 'Reshaping modern fantasy', for which Neil has acted as Guest Selector.&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Ocean-at-End-Lane/dp/1472200314/" target="_blank">The Ocean at the End of the Lane</a></i>&nbsp;is a deceptively simple and endlessly surprising novel full of mythic echoes, deep psychological resonances and some pretty scary monsters, and I'm hugely excited about discussing it with him.<br /><br />On Friday 23 August <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/susannah-cahalan" target="_blank">I'll be speaking to the journalist Susannah Cahalan</a> about&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-On-Fire-Month-Madness/dp/1846147395/" target="_blank">My Brain on Fire</a>,&nbsp;</i>her extraordinary memoir about her brush with the brain disease, encephalitis. One of the things I love about this book is the author's painstaking efforts to reconstruct this lost period of her life by pulling together a whole range of documents and sources of information, and I'm looking forward to asking her quite how she did it.<br /><br />And on Saturday 24 August I'll be reading from and talking about my novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Box-Birds-Charles-Fernyhough/dp/1908717572" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> with the Canadian author Colin McAdam, who will be talking about his new book&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-Truth-Colin-McAdam/dp/1847088473" target="_blank">A Beautiful Truth</a></i>. You can <a href="https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/colin-mcadam-charles-fernyhough" target="_blank">book for the event here</a>.<br /><br />Hope to see some of you there.&nbsp;</div>Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-67832308158524633202013-06-06T11:56:00.000-07:002013-06-06T11:59:19.482-07:00Review: Permanent Present Tense by Suzanne Corkin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t7HlMDor7rY/UbDb0pPdhRI/AAAAAAAAAVk/ofWJFxS0O5E/s1600/917G2cmdLmL._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t7HlMDor7rY/UbDb0pPdhRI/AAAAAAAAAVk/ofWJFxS0O5E/s320/917G2cmdLmL._SL1500_.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>I reviewed Suzanne Corkin's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Permanent-Present-Tense-memory-taught/dp/1846142717/" target="_blank">book on the famous amnesiac HM</a> for the <a href="http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/" target="_blank"><i>Literary Review</i></a>'s May 2013 edition:<br /><i><br /></i><b>Total Lack of Recall&nbsp;</b><br /><i>Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World</i><br />By Suzanne Corkin<br />(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 384pp £20)<br /><br />In February 2009, a pair of neuroscientists carried an icebox through gate security at Logan Airport in Boston, under the gaze of a PBS film crew sent to document the event. Bypassing the security scanner so as not to expose the contents of the cooler to radiation, one of the researchers carried the box onto a waiting plane while the other, the neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin, waved goodbye to her life’s work. Packed in ice inside the cooler was a human brain – possibly the most famous brain in history. It belonged to the amnesiac Henry Molaison, whose recent death had allowed his identity (for so long shrouded behind the initials ‘HM’) to be released to the world.<br /><br />Corkin, who probably knew Henry better than anyone else, worked with him from 1962, when she was a graduate student, to his death in 2008. Over the decades, neuropsychologists, psychologists and neuroscientists probed his short- and long-term memory, his language abilities and reasoning skills, with Corkin as the gatekeeper to this precious scientific resource. Although he found her face familiar, he never really understood who she was, and tended to assume that she was an old classmate from his high school in Hartford, Connecticut.<br /><br />Henry’s amnesia stemmed from a psychosurgical procedure intended to alleviate severe epilepsy. In the psychology textbooks, there is sometimes a suggestion that this was a cruel and unnecessary procedure, akin to the abhorrent lobotomies that were current at the time. Corkin is at pains to show that this was not a random act of cruelty or medical neglect, and that Henry’s debilitating fits provided good reason for conducting the surgery. William Beecher Scoville’s ‘frankly experimental’ procedure involved the removal of structures in the medial temporal lobes (deep in the brain above each ear), with devastating and unforeseen effects on Henry’s memory.<br /><br />Henry’s amnesia was so profound, and so neatly sparing of his other cognitive abilities, that he quickly became the most famous amnesia case study of them all. There will hardly be a psychology graduate alive who doesn’t know the details: HM’s inability to form new memories was coupled with a preserved capacity to acquire new skills, such as learning to use a walking frame. After the operation, Henry’s grip on the past amounted to a total of two genuine autobiographical memories: an aeroplane flight taken when he was 13 and the taste of his first cigarette when he was 10. For the 55 years until his death, he created no new memories.<br /><br />Most importantly of all, HM taught scientists about the importance of medial temporal lobe structures (predominantly the hippocampus) in converting short-term memories into long-term ones. Scientifically this is a hugely important story, and many will be excited that here, at last, is a chance to see the man behind the initials. In the right hands, this could have been a story of where the brain ends and the person begins, of the ethics of the close study of one individual. But readers who hope to understand Henry as a person will be disappointed. We rarely get to witness any of the human details that might bring him alive as a character. In one sense this is easily understandable: the observations of Henry were made for scientific, not biographical, purposes, and so the human element is largely unrecorded. But it is a scientifically informed biography that we are promised, and this worthy, detailed and ultimately rather lifeless book fails to meet that expectation in a number of ways.<br /><br />Part of the problem is a predictable neuro-reductionist arrogance. Because Henry had a damaged brain, his brain becomes the cause of everything. We are told that Henry could not have had normal dreams, for example, because the necessary regions of his brain had been replaced by fluid-filled spaces. Anything that might have shaped his character beyond the effects of drugs or psychosurgery is left unexplored. No one would attempt to write a biography of an intact or more ordinarily damaged person by relating everything to brain structure. If they did, the results would be as dull as this.<br /><br />There is nothing to suggest that Suzanne Corkin was anything other than a kind, attentive carer who wanted the best for her patient, as well as being an extremely thorough scientist (though her excitement at finally getting a chance to ‘harvest’ Henry’s brain will prove chilling for many readers). This is a human tragedy, and it deserves an approach that goes beyond the mere enumeration of clinical findings. Although we get plenty of ethics-committee discussion of the rights and wrongs of Henry’s story, along with tantalising flashes of the man’s personality (he had a quirky tendency to refer to Corkin as ‘Doctress’, for example), we get little insight into what Henry might have gone through or what emotions he would have grappled with. Corkin’s account has none of the richness of, say, Joshua Foer’s brief encounter with an amnesiac in his recent <i>Moonwalking with Einstein</i>, or (switching to a case of excessive rather than defective memory) of A R Luria’s classic portrait of S V Shereshevsky in <i>The Mind of a Mnemonist</i>. A more skilful writer might have saved us from learning what a human being becomes when he is boiled down to clinical data. HM’s personal tragedy had immensely valuable consequences; the disappointment of this book is that an individual has been reduced to an interesting brain. <br /><br />Published in the <i>Literary Review</i>, May 2013 (reproduced with permission).Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-58254329154834583292013-06-01T04:45:00.000-07:002013-06-01T04:45:17.912-07:00Longlisted: Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FcAeytTNNAg/UandIuerM8I/AAAAAAAAAVU/eQjXLfIs3B8/s1600/8905228651_f52fab9a99_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FcAeytTNNAg/UandIuerM8I/AAAAAAAAAVU/eQjXLfIs3B8/s1600/8905228651_f52fab9a99_m.jpg" /></a></div><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> has been longlisted for the 2013 <a href="http://royalsociety.org/awards/science-books/longlist/" target="_blank">Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books</a>. The <i>Guardian</i> has covered the announcement in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/grrlscientist/2013/jun/01/1" target="_blank">this blogpost from GrrlScientist</a>.<br /><br />GrrlScientist writes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"This may be a golden age of science writing -- we had to choose from well over a hundred wonderful books covering a huge range of topics. Many of them would have deserved a place on the list", said Professor Uta Frith, Chair of the judges.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"> "We happily and unanimously agreed on the long list, but we each had favourites that we were sad not to be able to include."&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The wide variety of subjects covered by these books is exciting -- there's something here for everyone!&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"We are very pleased that almost all of our selected books are ambitiously grounded in several subjects at once, be it biology, physics, psychology, or technology" continued Professor Frith. "The judges all commented on how much they enjoyed the process. It was an inspiring task."&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The judges on this year's panel are Jon Culshaw, impressionist and comedian; Dr Emily Flashman, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at University of Oxford; Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FRS (Chair), Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London; Joanne Harris, novelist and author of Chocolat; and Lucy Siegle, journalist and writer on environmental issues.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Besides providing the reading public with an excellent list of science books to read whilst on holiday at the beach, the longlist announcement coincides with a panel discussion at the World Science Festival held right now my fair city, New York. This festival is hosting a panel discussion entitled "Science and story: cutting-edge discovery for a literary public", with James Gleick, winner of the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books and two of the 2012 shortlisted authors Lone Frank and Brian Greene.</blockquote>I'm delighted to be on such an illustrious list, and am looking forward to catching up with the other longlisted titles. I haven't read nearly enough of them, but I'm pleased to see Caspar Henderson's amazing <a href="http://www.barelyimaginedbeings.com/" target="_blank"><i>Book of Barely Imagined Beings</i></a> on there.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-16459008305595534922013-05-19T02:02:00.002-07:002013-05-19T02:04:26.622-07:00A Box of Birds at the Hay Festival<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KaewEHwsvRw/UZiVEIsYRGI/AAAAAAAAAVE/s1ufQO1rhC8/s1600/logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KaewEHwsvRw/UZiVEIsYRGI/AAAAAAAAAVE/s1ufQO1rhC8/s1600/logo.jpg" /></a></div>On Monday 27 May I'll be at the <a href="https://www.hayfestival.com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2&amp;currencysetting=GBP&amp;localesetting=en-GB&amp;resetfilters=true" target="_blank">Hay Festival</a> talking about <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> at a <a href="https://www.hayfestival.com/p-6050-john-mitchinson-and-guests.aspx" target="_blank">special Unbound event</a>. &nbsp;Several Unbound authors will be pitching new projects or talking about books that have already been funded. Here's the full blurb:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">JOHN MITCHINSON AND GUESTS<br />Unbound Live 1<br />The award-winning crowd-funded publisher offers the Hay audience a chance to choose what gets published. Mixing authors whose books have already been funded with others pitching their ideas for books they want to write, this is a literary Dragons’ Den with a difference. Legendary writer and performer Salena Godden pitches her childhood memoir, Red Dwarf star Robert Llewellyn presents his science fiction sequel, novelist Charles Fernyhough asks whether neuroscience changes love, Strangler Hugh Cornwell and archaeologist-turned-crimewriter Francis Pryor compete for your support with a little help from publisher and QI Elf-master John Mitchinson. Light poetic relief from performance poet George Chopping.</blockquote>Hope to see some of you there.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-55951405691915213592013-05-07T00:04:00.003-07:002013-05-07T00:04:41.420-07:00Unboxed!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9sQU9DIfrJM/UOF-TYZBDEI/AAAAAAAAATE/Glx1yob3R28/s1600/IMG_0891.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9sQU9DIfrJM/UOF-TYZBDEI/AAAAAAAAATE/Glx1yob3R28/s320/IMG_0891.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> is published in its trade paperback edition today, which means it will be available from bookshops and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Box-Birds-Charles-Fernyhough/dp/1908717572" target="_blank">online retailers</a> as well as from the website of the publisher&nbsp;<a href="http://unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">Unbound</a>.<br /><br />Several hundred people pledged support to help this book see publication, and <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/a-box-of-birds-thank-you.html" target="_blank">I'm grateful to every one of them</a>.<br /><br />Today I am travelling to London to give a talk at the <a href="http://www.gvart.co.uk/gv-art-and-mind-symposium-16-tuesday-7-may-2013.html" target="_blank">Art and Mind Symposium</a> at GV Art in London, where I'll be discussing how neuroscience figures in literary fiction, and expanding on the themes of my recent <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/26/charles-fernyhough-memory-leaky-construction" target="_blank"><i>Guardian Review</i> piece on the topic</a>.<br /><br />You can find out more about the book by reading <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/lorenzo-circuit-fact-or-fiction.html" target="_blank">this blog post</a> and <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/pull-of-story.html" target="_blank">this one</a>. It's my first novel since <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/auctioneer.html" target="_blank">The Auctioneer</a></i> was published, fourteen years ago. If you've read the book already, you must be a subscriber. Thank you.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-50203748841492544132013-05-02T02:13:00.000-07:002013-05-02T02:13:43.179-07:00Neuroscience in fiction<div class="separator tr_bq" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0etFYfoW4qU/UYItQHFnjDI/AAAAAAAAAUk/PtZxrvagZPM/s1600/memorysunsetrex460.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0etFYfoW4qU/UYItQHFnjDI/AAAAAAAAAUk/PtZxrvagZPM/s200/memorysunsetrex460.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Publication day for <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> is just around the corner, so it was good to get a chance to set out&nbsp;some of the motivations behind the novel in last weekend's <i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/26/charles-fernyhough-memory-leaky-construction" target="_blank">Guardian Review</a></i>. As I explained in the piece, fiction gives us an unparalleled opportunity to understand the value of neuroscientific accounts of behaviour and experience. A lively comment thread has been building: you can <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/26/charles-fernyhough-memory-leaky-construction#start-of-comments" target="_blank">join in here</a>.&nbsp;The poet Helen Mort has written <a href="http://www.poetryonthebrain.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/neuro-inspiration.html" target="_blank">a thoughtful response on her blog</a>, including a wonderful poem about Phantom Limb Syndrome.<br /><br />A reminder that you can <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Birds-Charles-Fernyhough/dp/1908717572/" target="_blank">order the trade paperback edition of the novel here</a>.<br /><br />I've reproduced the article below with a few additional links:<br /><blockquote>We are in the middle of a debate about the status of neuroscience. Against the deceptive allure of neuroimaging and reported sightings of ‘brain centres’ for everything from <a href="http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/brains-sarcasm-centre-wow-thats-really.html" target="_blank">sarcasm</a> to <a href="http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132078267/neurotheology-where-religion-and-science-collide" target="_blank">religious experience</a>, there are stern reassurances that, if we were ever to work out the scientific basis of consciousness, it would be too complicated for us to understand. We use <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/mar/03/brain-not-simple-folk-neuroscience" target="_blank">lazy neurospeak</a> and stock up on <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain-pseudoscience" target="_blank">brain porn</a>, but do we draw from it knowledge we can use? Is neuroscience really changing the way we understand ourselves?&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>It might sound like an unlikely source of evidence, but we can find out something about the proper treatment of neuroscience by looking at how it functions in fiction. If tracing behaviour and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, novelists are bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves. And writers’ use of neuroscientific ideas will tell us something about how we consume such explanations and what meaning we extract from them.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work. Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Paul-Bloom-Free-Will-Does-Not/131170/" target="_blank">freewill</a>, no ‘self’ at the helm of our behaviour; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions. How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live? Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Which makes it slightly surprising that the neuro doesn’t actually feature all that prominently in literary fiction. A <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel" target="_blank">2009 article by Marco Roth</a> pointed out that bookish neuroscience is often connected with atypical and pathological behaviour. For example, Gary Lambert’s depression in Jonathan Franzen’s <i>The Corrections</i> gives a central role to his screwy neurotransmitters, but we don’t get neuro-explanations for the (debatably) more sane members of the Lambert family. Richard Powers’ <i>The Echo Maker </i>is more interested in the brain-damaged patient, Mark Schluter, than with the science-inflected self-descriptions of his neuropsychologist, Gerald Weber.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>If neuroscientific ideas are really going to prove their worth to novelists, they need to be able to provide satisfactory accounts of ordinary, non-pathological experience. One novel to attempt that is Ian McEwan’s <i>Saturday</i>, which tells the story of the neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, and his run-ins with the violent, chromosomally-disordered Baxter. Intimate with the workings of the brain, Perowne sees his own experience in terms of the bioelectrical processes that underlie it. Feeling a ‘sustained, distorting euphoria’, for example, he speculates that ‘there’s been a chemical accident while he slept—something like a spilled tray of drinks, prompting […] a kindly cascade of intracellular events’.<br /><br />Perowne’s professional familiarity with neuroscience certainly colours his reflections on himself, but it’s not clear that it changes his relationships with his own experience and behaviour: it doesn’t make him less trusting of his own memory or visual perception, for example. More importantly, this immersion in neuroscience doesn’t change the story. Setting aside a couple of episodes where Perowne’s medical knowledge is directly exploited, the plot of <i>Saturday</i> would not unfold any differently if he had been ignorant of brain science. Baxter’s wild behaviour ultimately has a genetic rather than a neurological cause (he suffers from Huntington’s disease). When Baxter’s course of action is violently altered, it is poetry—a recital of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’—rather than neuroscience that is effective in changing behaviour. Brain is a correlate of action, not a driver of it.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Other novelists are less optimistic about neuroscience’s capacity to make a difference. In Sebastian Faulks’ recent <i>A Possible Life</i>, the neuroscientist Elena pins the human capacity for self-awareness to a particular junction between ‘Glockner’s Isthmus’ (a fictional nexus of selfhood) and ‘the site of episodic memory’. While the neuroscience of Faulks’ tale fails to withstand close scrutiny, more interesting is the discovery’s lack of effect on the protagonist. Fêted internationally for her momentous breakthrough, Elena can’t connect her new neuroscientific reality to her own experience—or she won’t let herself. ‘She knew it to be truthful, valid and endlessly provable, but she didn’t allow the implications to affect the way she lived’.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Faulks’ story seems to be telling us that, even if the scientific message turned out to be manageably simple, being able to reduce quintessentially human mental capacities to neural processes would not add much to our understanding. Perhaps neuroscience will continue to be most useful in accounting for disorder; indeed, perhaps its way of working will be to turn everything into the pathological. Roth’s complaint about the fictional dominance of neuro-dysfunction mirrors a wider trend, evidenced in <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/12/disruptive_mood_dysregulation_disorder_in_dsm_5_criticism_of_a_new_diagnosis.html" target="_blank">the recent outcry about the psychiatry manual <i>DSM-V</i></a>, to see clinical symptoms where once we would have seen ordinary human variation.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Another reason for not expecting to see too many neuro-explanations in fiction is that they may just be too complex. Novels give us manuals for living, accounts of who we are that we can use as human beings, and neuroscience may be working at the wrong level of explanation. The kind of neuro-explanations that we might one day arrive at might be <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/what-neuroscience-really-teaches-us-and-what-it-doesnt.html" target="_blank">too complicated for most of us to understand</a>. If that’s the case, we’re unlikely to see novelists trying to weave them into a narrative. Fiction might function as a litmus test: not of what is true, but of what is useful.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>It’s also possible that we won’t always <a href="http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(12)00330-3" target="_blank">privilege neuro-truth above other kinds</a>. Just as genetic explanations seemed less seductive once the human genome (with its surprisingly small complement of genes) was described, so our enthusiam for the brain might wane as we recognise that much of its work actually translates into the functioning of <a href="http://stanford.edu/group/scsnl/cgi-bin/drupal_scsnl/sites/all/publications/2010/Bressler_Large-Scale_Brain_10" target="_blank">a disappointingly small number of ‘core’ networks</a>. There is still mind-bogglingly complexity—subsidiary neural centres ‘plug in’ to core networks in all sorts of complicated ways—but it might be of a more boring kind than that promised by a tally of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain" target="_blank">86 billion neurones</a>.<br /><br />Fiction exists for its own purposes, and writers and readers will rightly resist attempts to turn it into ‘evidence’ for or against anything. It’s possible that neuroscience is just too new for its ideas to have permeated literary fiction in the way that those other paradigm-changers, Darwinism and psychoanalysis, did. As a novelist, I am interested in exploring characters for whom the networks of the cortex are a real, charged presence. How does this understanding affect what you do when things start happening, when you have to make moral choices? Because of the way it puts subjectivity, character and moral action at its heart, the novel is the ideal crucible for the experiment.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Charles Fernyhough’s literary thriller <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i>, about brains and those who work with them, is published by Unbound on 7 May.</blockquote>Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-86404910988664008892013-04-16T03:04:00.002-07:002013-04-16T03:04:53.739-07:00Shortlisted! <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-48Yj3DLDY04/UW0hgipKObI/AAAAAAAAAUI/mq_ea8k11LI/s1600/foyles_150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-48Yj3DLDY04/UW0hgipKObI/AAAAAAAAAUI/mq_ea8k11LI/s1600/foyles_150.jpg" /></a></div><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank"><i>Pieces of Ligh</i>t</a> has been shortlisted for the <a href="http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/2013/news/best-book-of-ideas-2013-short-list-announced/" target="_blank">2013 Best Book of Ideas Prize</a>. The prize is sponsored by <a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/" target="_blank">Foyles</a> and administered by the <a href="http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/" target="_blank">Bristol Festival of Ideas</a>. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 20 May.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v2V7Q_xmhJ0/UW0hhBKVO8I/AAAAAAAAAUM/NUH4oXXqckA/s1600/BFOI_web_logo_URL_900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="44" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v2V7Q_xmhJ0/UW0hhBKVO8I/AAAAAAAAAUM/NUH4oXXqckA/s320/BFOI_web_logo_URL_900.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br />Here's the full press release:<br /><br />The shortlist for the 2013 Foyles/ Festival of Ideas Best Book of Ideas was announced today. The prize – worth £5,000 – is awarded to the book first published in the UK by a British author in 2012 which presents new, important and challenging ideas, which is rigorously argued, and which is engaging and accessible.<br /><br />The six shortlisted books are:<br /><br />Nick Cohen <i>You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom</i> (Fourth Estate)<br />Charles Fernyhough <i>Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory</i> (Profile Books)<br />Eliane Glaser <i>Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions</i> (Fourth Estate)<br />Ben Goldacre <i>Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients</i> (Fourth Estate)<br />Robert Macfarlane<i> The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot </i>(Hamish Hamilton)<br />Ali Smith <i>Artful</i> (Hamish Hamilton)<br /><br />The winner will be announced on 20 May 2013 at the awards evening that forms part of the ninth Bristol Festival of Ideas.<br /><br />Jasper Sutcliffe, Head of Buying for Foyles, sponsor of the award, said today:<br /><br />‘This list reflects the tremendous quality of contemporary British non-fiction, the type of writing that will keep the gears of your brain working long after you have absorbed the arguments. These writers are not afraid to engage with their subject from a personal level, and to use an imaginative approach to their work that challenges even the best writers of narrative fiction.’<br /><br />The judges for the award are writer and broadcaster Bidisha, Andrew Kelly, director of Bristol Festival of Ideas, writer and broadcaster Sian Norris, and Professor Peter Rawlings, Head, Department of Arts, University of the West of England.<br /><br />Andrew Kelly said today:<br /><br />‘This is an exceptional list which shows that British writers remain at the forefront of debate: from nature writing to bad medicine, the way we live today to death and immortality, from the natural world to the freedom to write and speak, these books fizz with ideas and deserve wide reading and debate.’<br /><br />The previous winners of the award are:<br /><br />2009 Nick Davies <i>Flat Earth News</i><br />2010 Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson<i> The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better&nbsp;</i><br />2011 Dan Hind <i>The Return of the Public</i><br />2012 Michael Symmonds and Paul Farley <i>Edgelands</i>Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-27804117788354597982013-03-25T10:59:00.000-07:002013-03-25T10:59:53.216-07:00Pieces of Light in America: the first week<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-10lIxTU3v3I/UU77GUxizVI/AAAAAAAAAT4/VqEoGPQDsWI/s1600/PiecesOfLight200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-10lIxTU3v3I/UU77GUxizVI/AAAAAAAAAT4/VqEoGPQDsWI/s1600/PiecesOfLight200.jpg" /></a></div><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> was published in the US last Tuesday. Here's a roundup of what's happened to the book in its first week of publication.<br /><br />The book was a <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/56379-pw-picks-the-best-new-books-for-the-week-of-march-18-2013.html" target="_blank">PW Pick in the trade magazine <i>Publishers Weekly</i></a>, meaning that it was picked by the editors as one of the ten best new books of the week:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In this refreshingly social take on a personal experience, psychologist Fernyhough aims to debunk the myth that memory is purely retrospective—memories, he argues, are not “heirloom[s] from the past” summoned back for display in the present; they are momentary reconstructions.</blockquote>The <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/pieces-of-light-cover-_n_2883332.html?utm_hp_ref=books" target="_blank"><i>Huffington Post</i> ran a piece on the cover art</a>, which was designed by Profile's art director Peter Dyer. Peter says:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The author talks about memory as a collage, coming from lots of different places in the brain. I liked the idea of using silver foil to illuminate some of the dots on the cover design – it gets across the idea that some memories burn really bright in our heads, while others are more blurred. As the book catches the light, the dots either shine or fall back – just like memories at certain points in our lives.</blockquote>I did a <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504367_162-57574871-504367/pieces-of-light-how-the-new-science-of-memory-illuminates-the-stories-we-tell-about-our-pasts-by-charles-fernyhough/" target="_blank">Q&amp;A with Jeff Glor of CBS News</a>, who asked me about the inspiration behind the book, and to whom I confessed about what I might be doing if I wasn't a writer and academic:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I have a part-time academic post, and I conduct research on topics such as hallucinations and child development as well as memory. If I had to give up all the bookish stuff completely, I'd be trying to make it as a progressive rock guitarist. Yeah, I know.</blockquote>I was delighted to be chosen as <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/pieces-of-light/id543483448?mt=11" target="_blank">Editors' Choice (best book of the week) on Apple's iBookstore</a>, which gave the book this lovely review:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Durham University professor Charles Fernyhough offers an absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory with his second nonfiction work, <i>Pieces of Light</i>. In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Although this exploration never shies away from formidable science and challenging psychological concepts (like contextual “flashbulb memories,” which can be startlingly vivid and completely false), Fernyhough reinforces his lessons with elegant personal memoirs and pop-culture references. (Harry Potter, Princess Diana, and Andy Warhol all make cameos.) For a topic so elusive—discussed in methods that range from the allegorical “crazy woman” to the brain’s mysterious mechanics—Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.&nbsp;</blockquote>On Sunday I was <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/03/17/174197245/reminder-our-memories-are-less-reliable-than-we-think" target="_blank">interviewed by Rachel Martin for NPR's Weekend Edition</a>. We talked about early memories, the faulty memories of couples, and quality vs quantity:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Thinking about this book made me realize that remembering more stuff isn't necessarily better. Being able to recall every card in a pack of playing cards or recall pi to the thousandth decimal place — why? Why would you want to do that? It's no use to me. For some people it might be important, but it's no use at all for me. What I would like to do is remember the stuff that I remember better, in more detail, more vividly.</blockquote>In this <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-child-in-time/201303/the-art-and-science-memory" target="_blank">new post for my <i>Psychology Today</i> blog</a>, I argue for a multidisciplinary approach to memory:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In all of these inquiries one thing has been clear to me. To understand autobiographical memory in its full richness, you need to get at it from the inside: as a subjective experience, as well as something that can be studied in the psychology or neuroscience lab. You need to ask what having a memory is like, and not be satisfied with purely objective descriptions of the phenomenon.</blockquote>Finally, I wrote <a href="http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/20/what-our-memories-tell-us-about-ourselves/" target="_blank">a piece for TIME Ideas</a> about how the distortions of memory reveal a truth about the self:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Bracing as it might be, this new way of thinking about memory does not have to lead to self-doubt. It simply requires that we take our memories with a pinch of salt, and forge new relationships with them. They may be a kind of fiction, but the manner of their making speaks volumes about those who create them. In the Obama-Ahmadinejad study, the researchers found that events were more likely to be falsely recalled if they fit the individual’s political affiliations (conservatives were more likely than liberals to ‘remember’ the Ahmadinejad handshake, for example). Whether the events happened or not, your biases and beliefs shape the kind of memories you form, and thus reveal the kind of person you are.</blockquote><br />Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-13876520546075586452013-03-08T05:35:00.000-08:002013-03-08T05:35:05.163-08:00A Q&A about Pieces of Light<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8mjgL5Sjam8/UTnnR065slI/AAAAAAAAATo/AH9vOPBj8cc/s1600/PoL+US+jacket+final.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8mjgL5Sjam8/UTnnR065slI/AAAAAAAAATo/AH9vOPBj8cc/s320/PoL+US+jacket+final.jpg" width="211" /></a></div><div><i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> is published in the US on 19 March. In the run-up to publication, I have been answering some questions about how the book came about and what I hoped to achieve with it. The questions are from the wonderful <a href="https://twitter.com/HDRUCKER" target="_blank">Heather Drucker</a> at HarperCollins. &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div>Q.: As you explain in the book, as a psychology undergrad in the late 1980s, memory was too immeasurable and too subjective to interest you. Can you explain how your perspective has changed since then?<br /><br />I think I’ve come to realize that the mind is too vast and special a thing to be reduced to numbers. Particularly with a phenomenon like memory, you have to try and get at the experience from the inside, and that means exploring what memories mean to the individual. In my view, the science of human experience has to be multidisciplinary; the insights of artists, philosophers and social scientists can add a huge amount to what we can learn from psychology experiments and neuroimaging.<br /><br />Q.: How has your work as a fiction writer inspired your interest in memory?<br /><br />Novelists deal in memory; it’s their seed corn. As a writer of fiction, you have to be interested in the experiences of your characters, and one of the ways writers create vivid characters is by giving them memories. You don’t just get to feel a great novelistic character’s thoughts, emotions, desires, and secrets; you also get to share in their re-experiencing of the past. In the book, I explore the idea that a novelist’s creation of a fictional memory has much in common with how autobiographical memory works in all of us: through the pulling together of different sources of information, and the shaping of those constructions by the needs of the present moment.<br /><br />Q.: In the first chapter of the book, you return to Sydney, to find locations from your first novel <i>The Auctioneer</i>. Can you explain the role that imagination plays in our memory?<br /><br />The idea that imagination is intimately linked to memory has a very long pedigree, but current research in psychology and neuroscience is putting a new spin on it. We don’t store memories as complete, immutable representations of the past; rather, we construct them from their constituent parts whenever the need arises. That’s how imagination works too: we take things that we know and we put them together in new ways. This turns out to be a very powerful idea for understanding the quirks of autobiographical memory, and it’s supported by some intriguing new research which seems to show that imagination and memory share common pathways in the brain.<br /><br />Q.: Quoting Marcel Proust and Andy Warhol, you explore the role of senses in our autobiographical memory. Do things such as smells and music have the power to unlock our memories?<br /><br />Sensory stimuli can be incredibly effective cues to memory. It’s often assumed that smell is a special case, perhaps because of its direct anatomical connections to the memory systems of the brain, but the picture is more complicated than that. Music may share many of smell’s special powers, and I describe how songs can cue memories in ordinary people but also in the case of one remarkable individual with dense amnesia. I also describe how people with amnesia who benefit from using SenseCam (a small camera worn around the neck) find that lost memories are brought back to consciousness by other kinds of sensory cue: in this case, visual ones.<br /><br />Q.: Freud once called it the “remarkable amnesia of childhood,” but as you show in PIECES OF LIGHT, there may be many reasons why few people remember much before the age of 4. Why is language so important when it comes to retaining childhood memories? And what other factors play a role in childhood amnesia?<br /><br />At the present time, we don’t understand childhood amnesia very well. It can’t be a simple matter of brain maturation, as the boundary of childhood amnesia seems to shift as we get older. School-age kids remember much further back into their early years than we adults do. Language is important, I think, because it gives us a way of organizing and making sense of our experience, and more organized and elaborated information sticks better in memory. As far as other factors are concerned, one suggestion is that the ability to construct a narrative is the last piece of the puzzle. Once kids can tell a story, they can start to do autobiographical memory.<br /><br />Q.: You write about your need to seed the memory of your father in your children who have never met him. How can our memory be tricked into retaining first-person memories for events we have never experienced?<br /><br />There’s good evidence now that many people are susceptible to the creation of false memories. The reason for this stems from memory’s reconstructive nature. In constructing a memory, we pull together lots of different kinds of information, including—occasionally—some information that shouldn’t be in the memory at all. Experiments have shown that simply imagining an event makes it more likely that you will later falsely ‘remember’ it happening. And social factors are very important in this process. I write about some recent findings that siblings often claim each other’s memories as their own, suggesting that our memories are constantly being reshaped by those around us.<br /><br />Q.: What do you think the future holds for the treatment of eyewitness testimony?<br /><br />Memory’s reconstructive nature means that it can be unreliable, and the fallibility of eyewitness testimony in particular has been demonstrated again and again. Things are starting to change in the legal system in recognition of this well-documented fallibility, although there is still some debate about just how this kind of evidence should be treated in court. I expect to see jurors and those working in the legal professions getting more training in how and particularly why, memory is unreliable.<br /><br />Q.: What new research is being explored in terms of memory manipulation for sufferers of PTSD and other trauma victims?<br /><br />I talked at length with one victim of trauma who had benefited from EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which involves a very simple procedure of watching a light move from side to side as you try to recall the traumatic events. No one really understands how EMDR works, and many are skeptical about its efficacy. Neuroscientists are also working towards targeting specific emotional memories in the brain, through injecting proteins that block memory formation, and they’ve had some success in experiments with mice. The trouble is, human memory is a much more complex process, with many different neural and cognitive systems involved. Despite the recent hype, my own view is that a ‘forgetting pill’ is still a long way off.<br /><br />Q.: In the book, you write, “memories are constructions, made in the present moment; they are not direct lines to the events themselves.” This idea of reconstructive memory is one that is widely accepted by science, but little understood by the public. What new understanding do you hope readers will gain from PIECES OF LIGHT?<br /><br />People do understand that memory can be unreliable, but they don’t always understand how and why it’s unreliable. If you ask large samples of people whether, say, memory works like a video camera, you find that most say that it does. I hope that people will enjoy reading about this fascinating area of research, and appreciate why I’ve tried to bring it back to human stories. It’s not just about the brain: it’s about the person, their past, their social and cultural contexts—all the different ways they make meaning of their experiences. Some people have told me that reading this book has given them a different relationship to their own memory. It’s one of the most extraordinary abilities we have, and knowing more about its powers and shortcomings can help us appreciate it even more.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-81245370649368554652013-02-10T06:01:00.000-08:002013-02-10T06:02:36.760-08:00Creative memories in Harold Pinter's Old Times<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.oldtimestheplay.com/connectwp/wp-content/themes/old-times-site/library/images/slider/06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.oldtimestheplay.com/connectwp/wp-content/themes/old-times-site/library/images/slider/06.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from&nbsp;http://www.oldtimestheplay.com</td></tr></tbody></table>Ian Rickson's new production of Harold Pinter's <i>Old Times </i>is currently <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21290863" target="_blank">wowing the critics</a> in London and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/arts/06iht-lon06.html?_r=0" target="_blank">beyond</a>. Late last year I was invited to visit rehearsals and talk to the cast about the workings of autobiographical memory, which plays such an important role in the piece. Those conversations led to me being invited to write an essay for the programme, which I have reproduced below.<br /><br />I got to see the production a couple of weeks ago, with Lia Williams in the part of Anna and Kristin Scott Thomas playing Kate (one interesting thing about the production is that the female actors <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/roleswapping-just-a-gimmick-or-an-extra-dimension-to-the-drama-8470442.html" target="_blank">swap roles</a> every few days). Many of the reviews have pointed out how different the two casting configurations are, and I'm hoping to see it again with the female roles reversed. Williams was a revelation as Anna, fanatically pulling on threads to the past and managing to convince the others of memories they hadn't known were there. Scott Thomas was devastatingly restrained and then brutal in the play's climax, as the three characters fought over the details of their past lives together.&nbsp;Rufus Sewell was funny, violent, simmering and obsessive as Deeley, the man whose memories of the play's two key events appear to be shaped by his feelings about the two women involved.<br /><br />Whichever way you get to see <i>Old Times</i>, it runs until 6 April. I couldn't recommend it more highly.<br /><br />From the <i>Old Times </i>programme: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Creative Memories</b>&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Forty years after its first performance, <i>Old Times </i>shows a prescient sensitivity to the quirks of autobiographical memory. The efforts of Anna, Kate and Deeley to reconstruct the past—and to some extent themselves—mirror many of the themes that have preoccupied cognitive scientists in the decades since Pinter wrote his play.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The psychologist and memory expert Martin Conway has proposed that two forces go head-to-head in memory. The force of <i>correspondence</i> acts to make our memories true to the way things were, while the force of <i>coherence</i> acts to tell a story that suits the self. We know that autobiographical memory is a reconstructive process, drawing together different sources of information and putting them together in ways that can differ subtly from telling to telling. These dynamic reshapings often serve to make memories as true to how we want the past to be as to how it actually was.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Deeley’s memory is slave to the force of coherence. He wants things to be a particular way, so he makes them so. The two key events of the play—the cinema showing and the party—are recalled in ways that selectively construct and filter the key details, even to the extent of screening out people who might actually have been there. In Deeley’s mind, only Kate was present at the showing of the movie <i>Odd Man Out</i>; only Anna was there at that fateful Westbourne Grove party. We don’t know the actual facts of the matter, because the two women’s memories can be as unreliable as Deeley’s, but we get the strong impression that he has reshaped these events to suit himself.<br /><br />It is Anna, of course, who actually gives voice to this idea: ‘There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.’ The reconstructive nature of memory guarantees it this creative power, and furnishes it with properties that make it something akin to imagination. In fact, neuroscientists now think that imagination and memory draw on common neural resources, in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes of the brain.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that imagination can feed into memory, and that things imagined can become things remembered. Psychological studies support the idea that simply imagining that something happened can in some cases lead us to ‘remember’ it. Kate, the dreamer, imagines seeing Anna dead (it’s not hard to see why she might feel this way about her old friend). But in the laboratory of her scenario-juggling mind, that imagining turns into a memory. ‘I remember you. I remember you dead.’ As she imagines it, so it takes place.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Of course, Old Times resists any such simple explanation, and the complexities of the play run far deeper than this. Like all of us, Kate edits her memories, updating them as new information comes to light. She knows that Anna didn’t really die—she is standing there before her, fully alive—but she still experiences it as a memory. This is not a hallucination or a sign of mental disorder. Psychologists have reported that large numbers of us have what are termed nonbelieved memories: memories for events that we no longer believe actually happened. That would appear to be the fate of some imaginings that are converted into memories and which we later realise could not literally be true. Some people ‘recall’ seeing live dinosaurs, or flying with their arms outstretched; the products of imagination take on the wrappings of memory. These rememberers know, rationally, that the events could not have happened, but they still unfold in their minds just like a memory would.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Pinter’s play is also alert to the emotional underpinnings of memory. Anna’s rose-tinted, impossibly perfect memories of London betray the fact that she wants things to have been a particular way in those heady days with the younger Kate. Emotional factors cause characters to mix memories that shouldn’t fit together. When Kate ‘remembers’ Anna lying dead, the corpse’s face is covered with dirt. One reading of this is that she has incorporated details from a real memory—the trick she played on Deeley in response to his sexual expectation—into the imagined scenario. At another point, recalling his trip to a café before the notorious party, Deeley clearly mixes up his memories of the two women, because it suits his revisionist self to do so.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Remembering is not something we do alone. For the characters in <i>Old Times</i>, negotiating an account of the past is a fraught, dangerous process. Memories can be weapons as well as instruments of persuasion. And memory has only a part-time interest in the truth. It deals in scenarios, real ones and imagined ones, making and remaking the self from the partial, damaged information available. As another writer, Mark Twain, observed in his autobiography, ‘When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.’&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Charles Fernyhough’s book on autobiographical memory, <i>Pieces of Light</i>, is published by <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pieces-Light-science-Imagine-Remember/dp/184668448X/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_1" target="_blank">Profile</a> in the UK and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Light-Science-Illuminates-Stories/dp/0062237896/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_1" target="_blank">HarperCollins</a> in the US.</blockquote>Programme essay reproduced by permission of John Good Ltd. Publishing.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-9231164346144056292012-12-31T04:23:00.001-08:002012-12-31T04:23:26.306-08:00A Box of Birds: thank you<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9sQU9DIfrJM/UOF-TYZBDEI/AAAAAAAAATE/Glx1yob3R28/s1600/IMG_0891.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9sQU9DIfrJM/UOF-TYZBDEI/AAAAAAAAATE/Glx1yob3R28/s320/IMG_0891.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>As 2012 draws to a close, it's a good time to say thank you again to the people who made <i><a href="http://unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> possible. That's a lot of people.<br /><br />Readers of this blog will know that crowd-funding a book is a long haul, and that it depends on the generosity of many friends and strangers. I hope to have got some of you interested in Yvonne's story and the questions it raises. We've covered a lot of ground, from the <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/pull-of-story.html" target="_blank">fundamental question of why human beings tell stories</a>, through <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/how-stephen-fry-made-me-do-it.html" target="_blank">my own particular story of getting addicted to writing fiction</a>, to <a href="http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/21/sciencing-fiction/" target="_blank">the practical issue of how to balance fiction-writing with doing science</a>.<br /><br />Those who pledged for the special edition hardback should have received their copy by now. I hope you enjoy reading it, and that we can keep the conversation going.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LamaAWWrFUk/UOF-bx2SGuI/AAAAAAAAATM/gBS20m0gJlE/s1600/IMG_0895.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LamaAWWrFUk/UOF-bx2SGuI/AAAAAAAAATM/gBS20m0gJlE/s320/IMG_0895.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>Just before Christmas I went to London to sign some copies for those who had pledged at that level. Here's a picture of me and my editor, Rachael, working hard to get them signed and dedicated before the courier arrived to take them back to the warehouse for dispatch.<br /><br />Don't forget that there are <a href="http://www.unbound.co.uk/" target="_blank">plenty more great books needing support at Unbound</a>, and that your support could help to make any of these books happen. For a recent catch-up on how crowd-funding is taking root, see <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/any-other-business/8803101/neither-catharsis-not-cataclysm-but-a-year-of-mobile-money-and-digital-books/" target="_blank">this piece in the <i>Spectator</i></a>.<br /><br />Happy New Year to all of you!Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-79984283331915293282012-12-14T00:13:00.000-08:002012-12-14T00:16:55.577-08:00Pieces of Light: 2012 in review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSwxEeOgGP4/UMrcb3IScsI/AAAAAAAAASo/Qm2pPVCT7tE/s1600/Cover150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSwxEeOgGP4/UMrcb3IScsI/AAAAAAAAASo/Qm2pPVCT7tE/s1600/Cover150.jpg" /></a></div>It's been good to see <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> appearing on a few of the end-of-year round-up lists:<br /><br />In the <i>Sunday Times</i>, Christopher Potter chose it as one of his <a href="http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article1168843.ece" target="_blank">science Books of the Year</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In <i>Pieces of Light</i>, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.</blockquote>In the <i>Sunday Express</i>, historian Bettany Hughes said it was the book she would most like to find under her tree: 'a very clever book', she called it.<br /><br />The <i>New Scientist</i>, who <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/07/how-much-can-you-trust-your-own-memory.html" target="_blank">reviewed the book back in July</a>, picked it as one of their top ten popular science books of the year, calling it 'a moving tour through the unique deceptions of memory'. They are running a <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22567-win-our-10-favourite-popular-science-books-of-2012.html" target="_blank">promotion where you can win all ten books on the list</a>.<br /><br />Finally, the excellent podcast series <a href="http://www.littleatoms.com/" target="_blank">Little Atoms</a> have picked it as one of their <a href="https://twitter.com/littleatoms" target="_blank">top ten books of 2012</a>. I <a href="http://www.littleatoms.com/charlesfernyhough.htm" target="_blank">talked to Neil from Little Atoms about the book</a> back in August.<br /><br />You can read some of the reviews from earlier in the year in the panel on the right.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KCXlv8CONPE/UMrcu9Q3wKI/AAAAAAAAASw/u8yL7BN4SQA/s1600/PiecesOfLight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KCXlv8CONPE/UMrcu9Q3wKI/AAAAAAAAASw/u8yL7BN4SQA/s200/PiecesOfLight.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>There's still time to <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pieces-Light-science-Imagine-Remember/dp/184668448X/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_1" target="_blank">grab a copy</a> for a last-minute Christmas present. In the US, you'll have to wait until 19 March, when the book is published by HarperCollins. Here's how the US cover looks. The book is also <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Light-Science-Illuminates-Stories/dp/0062237896/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_1" target="_blank">available for pre-order</a>.<br /><br />Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-32477833726422365682012-11-04T01:35:00.000-07:002012-11-04T01:37:15.849-08:00To The River<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p3mPzaHBsyk/UJY1X5zzYzI/AAAAAAAAASU/51QpV4PW084/s1600/510x340.fitandcrop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p3mPzaHBsyk/UJY1X5zzYzI/AAAAAAAAASU/51QpV4PW084/s200/510x340.fitandcrop.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>I didn't get to see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_Butterworth" target="_blank">Jez Butterworth</a>'s West-End-and-Broadway smash <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_(play)" target="_blank"><i>Jerusalem</i></a>, so I wasn't sure what to expect when, a couple of months ago, I sat down to read the script for his new play. I had been invited to go along to rehearsals to talk to the cast about memory, not least because <i><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/play-of-the-week-the-river-royal-court-london-sw1-8274159.html" target="_blank">The River</a> </i>is about fishing, and it's a fishing memory that opens my new book&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i>.<br /><br />I found it a fascinating, deliciously subtle piece which was still shifting and resonating in my mind after my several readings. When I went along to rehearsals to meet the team, it was confirmed to me that the play is very much about how memories define us and trap us. The script dealt expertly with the several different kinds of memory involved in the story, from elaborated, self-defining memories of childhood to shocking shards of trauma. I'd gone along very early in rehearsals, and was looking forward to seeing how the play developed over the rest of the rehearsal period and the first few performances.<br /><br />On Thursday I was lucky enough to see the production for real. The professional reviewers have done <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/04/the-river-nsfw-theatre-reviews" target="_blank">a better job of reviewing it</a> than I could, and so I'll just say that I loved it. Three(-ish; there's a plot point about that) complex and intriguing characters were brought to life by outstanding performances, and there were some electric moments as the power relations among the lovers shifted cataclysmically. There is a scene involving a scarlet dress which is one of the most compelling things I've seen on stage. The play is also very funny. I'd been told to sneak a peek at the bookshelf on the set, and I was thrilled to see my book up there, looking out over the fishing hut in which all the events unfold.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8Iip3qLc_U0/UJTgqKS_nTI/AAAAAAAAAR0/v8jjFsIGvic/s1600/IMG_0854.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8Iip3qLc_U0/UJTgqKS_nTI/AAAAAAAAAR0/v8jjFsIGvic/s320/IMG_0854.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />If you get a chance to catch this amazing play, <a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/the-river" target="_blank">do go and see it</a>.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-20433955722919342332012-11-03T06:25:00.002-07:002012-11-03T06:25:44.035-07:00A Box of Birds: the cover artLast week's special <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> event at the <a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/42-a-box-of-birds-charles-fernyhough.html" target="_blank">Durham Book Festival</a> was great fun. Thanks to everyone who came along, and to Professor Simon James for his excellent chairing.<br /><br />There are still a couple of days left to be <a href="http://www.unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">listed as a subscriber</a>. The list that will go in the back of the book will be closed at noon on Monday 5 November. You can see who has already supported the book <a href="http://www.unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds/subscribers" target="_blank">here</a>.<br /><br />Unbound's designer, <a href="http://danmogford.com/" target="_blank">Dan Mogford</a>, has been hard at work on a jacket design, and I'm delighted to reveal it here for the first time. I love it; please let me know what you think!<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_keRsR043k/UJUbLmxbWHI/AAAAAAAAASE/J8WAvENImlo/s1600/A+Box+of+Birds-E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_keRsR043k/UJUbLmxbWHI/AAAAAAAAASE/J8WAvENImlo/s400/A+Box+of+Birds-E.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><br />Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-33958349141190561082012-10-20T09:50:00.000-07:002012-10-20T09:57:46.831-07:00Saturday at the Durham Book FestivalIt's a busy Saturday for me next week at the Durham Book Festival.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5uK-bKnp2Zs/UILTYmhbCoI/AAAAAAAAARg/c36JgeOnXHA/s1600/DBF.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5uK-bKnp2Zs/UILTYmhbCoI/AAAAAAAAARg/c36JgeOnXHA/s320/DBF.tiff" width="320" /></a></div>First, I'll be hosting a School of Life event on '<a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/46-thriving-not-surviving-with-the-school-of-life.html" target="_blank">Thriving not Surviving</a>' with my <a href="http://www.theschooloflife.com/" target="_blank">School of Life</a> colleagues Philippa Perry, John-Paul Flintoff, Roman Krznaric and Tom Chatfield. The TSOL gang have written a series of fabulous books which redefine the meaning of self-help. From the blurb:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In an age of moral and practical confusions, The School of Life offers a new take on the self-help book. For this special event we have invited four of the School of Life’s thinkers to share their views on how we can all survive living in the modern world. Philippa Perry takes on the subject of <i>How to Stay Sane</i>, John-Paul Flintoff tells us <i>How to Change the World</i>, Roman Krznaric advises on <i>How to Find Fulfilling Work</i>, and Tom Chatfield proffers advice on <i>How to Thrive in the Digital Age</i>. At the event, each of the speakers will give an introduction to their ideas and engage in debates with each other and you the audience about the subjects.</blockquote>The books have been a huge success and were recently published in German translation. All four are very entertaining speakers and it promises to be a great event.<br /><br />Straight after that I'll be doing&nbsp;<a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/42-a-box-of-birds-charles-fernyhough.html" target="_blank">a special event on&nbsp;<i>A Box of Birds</i></a>. I'll&nbsp;talking about how the novel came to be and its relations with the science of memory and consciousness.&nbsp;The event will be chaired by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/academicstaff/?id=271" target="_blank">Professor Simon James</a>&nbsp;of Durham's English Department. We'll be talking about the role of science in the novel, the rise and possible fate of the neuronovel, and what a properly scientific treatment of memory in the novel might look like. We'll also be talking about my new book on autobiographical memory, <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light: The new science of memory</a></i>.<br /><br />Those who have subscribed to <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> should be getting their copies before the end of the year (I've been working on the proofs this week). It's not too late to become a subscriber and get your name (or the name of someone you are gifting it to) <a href="http://www.unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">in the back of the book</a>.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-18126689385745841232012-10-16T03:52:00.002-07:002012-10-16T03:53:32.670-07:00Neuroscience and the novel: Strange Bedfellows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HIvQ3q7wk2g/UH071TmRzQI/AAAAAAAAARM/XV-lTn2AtYc/s1600/fernyhoughposter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HIvQ3q7wk2g/UH071TmRzQI/AAAAAAAAARM/XV-lTn2AtYc/s400/fernyhoughposter.png" width="282" /></a></div>This is the fabulous poster that has been put together by the <a href="http://strange-bedfellows.org/?page_id=5.php" target="_blank">Strange Bedfellows</a> team in advance of my talk there on Thursday.&nbsp;I'll be speaking particularly about my attempt, in <i><a href="http://www.unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i>, to trace the limits of neuroscientific framings of human experience and behaviour on the pages of the novel and beyond.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-66998157801150483092012-09-29T02:16:00.001-07:002012-09-29T02:16:33.487-07:00Science and fiction: once more with links<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u-EJiBbG0Ek/UGa7naE5PNI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/2CvCs3wNIPg/s1600/Cover150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u-EJiBbG0Ek/UGa7naE5PNI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/2CvCs3wNIPg/s1600/Cover150.jpg" /></a></div>A few weeks ago, during the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was asked to contribute to the Guardian's 'What I'm thinking about...' series which was capturing some of the debates and conversations going on in Charlotte Square Gardens. A few of the links didn't make it through into the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/22/charles-fernyhough-science-fiction?INTCMP=SRCH" target="_blank">published piece</a>, so here it is again with all the links reinstated:<br /><br />Whether it’s finding bosons or parking cars on Mars, science can give fictional characters a whole lot of different new things to think about. But can the influence ever work in the other direction—can scientists ever find inspiration in fiction? That’s a question that came up at the<a href="http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/" target="_blank"> Edinburgh International Book Festival</a> this weekend. In the first of <a href="http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/themes/science-meets-fiction" target="_blank">a series of events</a> funded by the <a href="http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/august-2012-public-engagement-events-edinburgh-special/" target="_blank">Wellcome Trust</a>, I was in conversation with the US novelist Ben Marcus, whose novel <i><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2012/jun/08/future-dystopia-utopia-books-podcast" target="_blank">The Flame Alphabet</a></i> thrillingly recasts language as a deadly toxin, forcing us to rethink its relations with private thought and public communication. One thing we talked about was how the sciences of human experience, including psychology and cognitive neuroscience, have to be interested in that experience from the inside. There’s no better way of getting at the subjectivity of an individual consciousness than through a skilful fictional narrative. Fiction can also be a laboratory for testing out different explanations of human behaviour. When Darwinism and psychoanalysis reshaped our conceptions of humanity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, <a href="http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2012/02/charles-fernyhough-asks-does-neuroscience-change-the-way-we-understand-ourselves.html" target="_blank">writers were there as barometers of those new understandings</a>. <a href="http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/21/sciencing-fiction/" target="_blank">Neuroscience</a> promises a similarly profound shift in how we make sense of ourselves, and we can <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hxh7b" target="_blank">look to writers</a> to explore whether brain science will ultimately provide us with satisfactory accounts of who we are.<br /><br />Memory is another area where the insights of writers can spark scientific enquiry. You could argue that all novels are at some level about memory, and writings on the topic are a rich source on the subjectivity of the experience. Autobiographical memory is defined as our memory for the events of our own lives, and the recent science of this topic forces us to rethink it in quite a radical way. Rather than recording events like a video camera, we reconstruct past events by integrating many different kinds of information, creating a kind of multimedia collage which can differ subtly from telling to retelling. In immersing myself in this topic, I didn’t only look at the work of scientists. Novelists have always been attuned to the vagaries of autobiographical memory, from Proust’s writings about the links between <a href="http://pieceslight.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/madeleine-moment.html" target="_blank">memory, sensation and emotion</a> to A. S. Byatt’s delineation of <a href="http://www.thememorynetwork.net/wp/2011/11/a-s-byatt-launches-the-memory-network/" target="_blank">subtle phenomenological distinctions between kinds of early memory</a>. Looking further back, medieval writers turn out to have been remarkably prescient about memory’s <a href="http://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/labs/dudai/pages/PDFs/Dudai_Nature_2005a.pdf" target="_blank">recombinative, future-oriented function</a>, while the understanding of narrative has been highlighted as a limiting factor on <a href="http://pps.sagepub.com/content/1/4/277" target="_blank">small children’s ability to do autobiographical memory</a>. If we want a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/mind-bending-why-our-memories-are-not-always-our-own-7939049.html" target="_blank">better understanding of how the brain tells stories about the past</a>, it seems that we could do worse than read fiction.<br /><br />This ‘reconstructive’ view of memory also raises questions about the genre of life writing. When we read a memoir, we are often asked to take the vividness of the memory as a guarantee of its veracity. In contrast, writers like Janice Galloway have been praised for acknowledging the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/12/made-up-janice-galloway-review" target="_blank">narrative, storytelling nature of memory</a>. At <a href="http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/janice-galloway-2" target="_blank">her event on Sunday</a>, I had the chance to ask Galloway whether memoirists should do more to acknowledge the reconstructive nature of their art. From the writer’s point of view, she responded, there is no ‘should’ about it; each life-writer has to negotiate their own relationship with the past. Artful, emotionally charged narratives, like our own ordinary and precious memories, will always hold a distinctive kind of truth, whether or not they are literally accurate representations of what happened.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-24430130622623253922012-09-29T01:24:00.000-07:002012-10-20T09:41:14.213-07:00A note on some upcoming talksI've got a busy run-up to Christmas talking about <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i>, <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> and other things.<br /><br />On Saturday 6 October I'll be at the <a href="http://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/book-festival-scotland-eventsearch.asp?wbf=1954" target="_blank">Wigtown Book Festival</a> talking about memory. It'll be my first time at this festival, and I'm looking forward to a variety of treats including a strand celebrating their famous starry skies, and some big names including Sara Maitland, Marina Warner, Jon Ronson and James Kelman. You can see the full programme <a href="http://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/index.asp" target="_blank">here</a>.<br /><br />On Friday 12 and Saturday 13 October I'll be at the <a href="http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/?q=fixtureslist" target="_blank">Institute of Philosophy</a> in London talking about memory and narrative in a conference on narrative and self-understanding in psychiatric disorder. I'll be talking about some of the memory distortions that I wrote about in <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i>.<br /><br />On Thursday 18 October I'll be at the University of York talking about '<a href="http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/public-lectures/autumn2012/neuroscience-novel/" target="_blank">Neuroscience and the novel: Strange Bedfellows?</a>' This talk will be part of the <a href="http://strange-bedfellows.org/?page_id=5.php" target="_blank">Strange Bedfellows</a> programme exploring relations between creativity and criticism. I'll be talking about <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> and my experiences of trying to combine science and fiction-writing. There'll be a particular focus on my attempt, in <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i>, to trace the limits of neuroscientific framings of human experience and behaviour on the pages of the novel and beyond. <br /><br />On Wednesday 24 October I head to Berlin for the <a href="http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/experimental-entanglements-in-cognitive-neuroscience-workshop-berlin-25-26-october-2012/" target="_blank">Experimental Entanglements in Cognitive Neuroscience</a> workshop. My title is 'If thinking is dialogic, who's doing the talking?'<br /><br />Saturday 27 October sees me back in Durham for the Durham Book Festival. I'll be hosting a School of Life event on '<a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/46-thriving-not-surviving-with-the-school-of-life.html" target="_blank">Thriving not Surviving</a>' with my School of Life colleagues Philippa Perry, John-Paul Flintoff, Roman Krznaric and Tom Chatfield. I'll then be doing <a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/42-a-box-of-birds-charles-fernyhough.html" target="_blank">a special event on <i>A Box of Birds</i></a>, talking about how the novel came to be and its relations with the science of memory and consciousness. The event will be chaired by <a href="http://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/academicstaff/?id=271" target="_blank">Professor Simon James</a> of Durham's English Department.<br /><br />On Wednesday 31 October I'll be speaking at the <a href="http://hearingthevoice.org/" target="_blank">Psychosis Special Interest Group</a> at Durham University on the inner speech model of voice-hearing and auditory verbal hallucinations, as part of our Wellcome-funded '<a href="http://hearingthevoice.org/" target="_blank">Hearing the Voice</a>' project.<br /><br />On the weekend of 24 and 25 November, I'll be in Cheltenham participating in the <a href="http://www.medicineunboxed.com/about-medicine-unboxed-1/l" target="_blank">Medicine Unboxed 2012 </a>conference. The theme is 'Belief' and the speakers include Richard Holloway, Sebastian Faulks, Jo Shapcott and Bryan Appleyard. I'll be talking about <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> and offering some thoughts on neuromaterialism reductionism and the refuge of art.<br /><br />Finally, I'll be in conversation with the novelist, poet and memoirist Blake Morrison at the University of London on Tuesday 27 November. Our theme will be '<a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/contemporary-cultures-of-writing/life-writing-borderlands.shtml" target="_blank">Memoir and Memory</a>', and the event is part of a series entitled 'Life Writing: borderlands between fact and fiction', organised by&nbsp;the Open University and University of London.Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8790418453028921218.post-37058983598347947862012-09-19T02:37:00.002-07:002012-09-26T00:45:47.475-07:00A Box of Birds: updateThe final edit of <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/abob.html" target="_blank">A Box of Birds</a></i> is now complete. The production schedule means that those who supported the book (thank you!) should receive their copies before the end of the year. <br /><br />There is still time to <a href="http://unbound.co.uk/books/a-box-of-birds" target="_blank">order the special edition and be listed as a subscriber</a>.<br /><br />There should be some cover art soon and I'll post it on this blog as soon as I can.<br /><br />I'll be doing a special event around the book at the <a href="http://www.durhambookfestival.com/2012-programme/42-a-box-of-birds-charles-fernyhough.html" target="_blank">Durham Book Festival on Saturday 27 October</a>. I'll be&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/academicstaff/?id=271" target="_blank">Professor Simon James</a>&nbsp;from the English Department at Durham, and will&nbsp;be talking about <i><a href="http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/pol.html" target="_blank">Pieces of Light</a></i> as well.<br /><br />In November I'll be talking about <i>A Box of Birds</i> at <a href="http://www.medicineunboxed.com/about-medicine-unboxed-1/l" target="_blank">Medicine Unboxed 2012</a> in Cheltenham.<br /><br />The trade edition of the novel will appear in May.<br /><br />Charles Fernyhoughnoreply@blogger.com0